29 Apr
2016
29 Apr
'16
1:06 a.m.
Many thanks for the explanations, so your SCBX is bigger than
I thought ;-) You hobby of collecting phones and having the
SCBX perfectly match and keep us up to date if you receive
the first call from an external paricipant. ;-)
while designing a media gateway to sit on the ROLMbus
would
be a heck of a project ;)
All the modern single board computers (Rhaspberry, Arduino)
have got plenty of computational power, so after having solved
the voltage-level conversion problem almoust any of the
modern "toys" should be able to handle the interfacing in
software I guess.
After your hint, I found this pretty cool video on YouTube
giving an nicely illustrated decription on how the CBX
works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8J6CGI6HA0
Quite clever design...
Best regards and good luck with your SCBX,
Erik.
On Thu, 28 Apr 2016, Sean Caron wrote:
On Thu, 28 Apr 2016, Erik Baigar wrote:
On Wed, 27 Apr 2016, Sean Caron wrote:
You're welcome! Mine is actually a relatively small example. It has 84 PCBs
in total across six shelves and two conjoined racks with a little disk and
control panel between them.
If you've seen a picture of a lowboy PDP 11/60 ... I always use that as
something to relate the general dimensions. The ROLM is maybe a little
taller. I need to post some pictures of the complete system and rack.
I would love to get the ROLM running someday and get it hooked up to a VoIP
network... Another hobby of mine is collecting PBX systems and telephones and
I've already done this for a Definity as well as a Nortel M1 and I have no
doubt that the same could be done for the CBX [1].
The CBX (eventually) supported DS1 interfaces ... which would IMO be the
coolest way to connect the CBX to a media gateway ... but one day once I get
the PBX running, I should be able to get it routing calls again with
something like a Cisco box acting as an external media gateway ... while
designing a media gateway to sit on the ROLMbus would be a heck of a project
;)
I find the design of the CBX really interesting. IMO, their appearance belies
that ROLM was a computer vendor first a a phone equipment maker second. Not
in a perjorative sense, just stylistically. Comparing them against boards
from WECo/ATT/Lucent/Avaya, Nortel and Harris.
Best,
Sean
[1] http://www.ckts.info
I don't have any ROLM computers (not that I
wouldn't love one) but I am
proud to say that I have a complete ROLM SCBX 8000. I've tried to take
some pictures and compile some information on my personal site:
http://wildflower.diablonet.net/~scaron/rolmfieldguide/index.html
Wow, that is a lot of PCBs to handle the telephone stuff!
Thanks for sharing the pictures - also interesting to see,
that they used a Z80 in there but never used microprocessors
in their MIL computers (even the later ones!)...
As a project you could design a VoIP PCB for the SCBX ;-)
Erik.